Anachronisms Forever

This column is currently busy serving
other more-deserving readers. Please wait while we play Wagner's
Ring Cycle—or you can piss off quick—who
needs you Philistines? You can press #1 for
Solti (the default), #2 for Karajan or #3 for Sir Andrew Lloyd
Webber. Be warned: #3 is the gotchyer exit that precludes all
future re-entry.

We'll “hangup” on you, reminding us that the anachronism
has survived wondrously from Homer's misplaced metallurgy
(according to Robert Graves, Homer nodded over his iron and bronze
age technologies), through Shakespeare's chiming clocks
(Julius Caesar), and into our post-vertical
ebonite telephony.

We no longer “hangup” the phone, simply bang the bugger
down flat. Yet there's still a BEL lurking in the ASCII char-set
although gongs per se have been replaced by tones—and even Ma
Bell, my ever-pined heartthrob (I had her once in the back of a
London taxi), has deserted wire-ridden communications for cable TV
and credit cards.

Simple verbs such as “ship” have also suffered the
anachronistic “curse”. When X says they'll “ship” Y by Z, or
else, I can't help but think of the Titanic,
Lusatania, Bismarck and
Scharnhorst.

Digging deeper, dear patient reader, Virgil and that crowd,
predicted the near-future subjunctive gerundive (whatever) with
in navem impositurus esse (to be about to
[load] ship), but with the ironical secondary meaning of
imponere (to deceive or cheat).

Meanwhile, by the time this column reaches you, Bob Toxen's
long-awaited tour-de-force Real World Linux
Security—Intrusion Prevention, Detection and Recovery
(Prentice-Hall) should have been shipped, nay, airmailed, to a
bookshelf or Amazon site near you. I can now reveal the identity of
the Mystery Man prefacer hinted at in the pre-pub manuscripts I've
been enjoying. No other than Eric Raymond who is much more
qualified than moi to test and endorse Bob
Toxen's efforts. Further, the book has gained a positive blurb from
Steve Bourne, without whose pioneering shell where we would be
today?

Check
www.cavu.com/book.html
for the latest price/availabity news. Security is one of those
ever-changing challenges. As Bob told me, he feared his book, like
Tristram Shandy's memoirs, could never be completed: “It's killing
me and may appear posthumously.”

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